The Book Birds

The “Book Birds” are our Carnegie shadowing book group.

The Carnegie Medal is an annual award given to an author for the most outstanding piece of children’s literature. Nominated by librarians, the short-listed titles are announced in March and the winner in late June.

Each year, alongside other schools across the country, we shadow the Carnegie Book Award by reading the short-listed titles prior to the announcement of the winner in June. We meet with other local schools to discuss and debate our thoughts on the books, play games and activities and vote for our favourite title. The reading group is an excellent way to sample the very best in current, children’s literature and is open to students from all year groups in the secondary phase of our school.

 

The 2016 Carnegie shadowing begins…….

One of the annual events for the school library is shadowing the CILIP Carnegie and Kate Greenaway book award. Our shadowing reading group “The Book Birds” first met last week, the day after the shortlist was announced and we were all super excited. We are a small group of 12 students from Years 7, 8 & 9, with many returning from last year.

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Ever heard of the phrase “Don’t judge a book by it’s cover”? Well that’s exactly what we did do! To start with we looked at the covers of the 8 shortlisted titles and ranked them from 1 (the best) to 8 (the worst). The top books based on their covers were “One” and “The Ghosts of Heaven”. We then read the blurb and re-judged them. The most popular book changed; it became “Lies We Tell Ourselves”. Many people decided that some of the books sounded better than they looked.

We have chosen to read “The Lie Tree” and “Five Children on the Western Front” first. We chose these books to go together because they are both winners of the Costa Book Award. To begin with they were both quite low in popularity, but now are being read with great enthusiasm. We are only half way through the stories, and there are mixed opinions about the pair, but in general they are being enjoyed.

Look out – we will be blogging our reviews after Easter when we have finished the books. Kyra, Year8

 

Carnegie longlist – some thoughts by Amelia, Year 8

On the 16th February the Carnegie longlist was announced. Many old winners and shortlisted authors return again to try and win Britain’s most prestigious award. In this blog I will be looking at and focusing on some of the books longlisted. I hope to keep this blog up and running so I can keep you updated on our Carnegie groups’ reading adventures. Please feel free to comment at any time!

Terry Pratchett: Shepherd’s Crown

9780857534811Terry Pratchett’s book Shepherd’s Crown, released after his death, has been nominated for the Carnegie longlist. The fifth book in the Discworld series, focusing on the experience of Tiffany Aching, this book is written in comedy-fantasy style we have come to love from Pratchett. The book has an epic battle with elves, has old characters in it but also introduces some new characters such as Geoffrey, a pacifist who wants to be a witch. This book was immensely popular, in its first three days on sale, it sold 52,846 copies. Critics mostly liked it. Den of ‘Geek’ awarded the book five out of five stars, saying “Some beloved elements of the world we’ve come to know over the last thirty-two years come to a close, while others are left to walk on into a world we won’t get to see.” The Guardian said “This is not a perfect example of Pratchett’s genius, but it is a moving one.” This suggests that while it is a good read the technique is not as good as previous books. This said, I believe this book is a very sure contender for the Carnegie medal giving Pratchett’s engaging style of writing, recent death and popularity.

Patrick Ness: The Rest of Us Just Live Here

22910900Patrick Ness again returns to the Carnegie long list, being one of only seven authors to have won the Carnegie medal twice and one of two to win it in consecutive years. His book last year, More Than This, was a beautiful book addressing many important themes and while it did not win, it was huge hit amongst our reading group. I believe that following in the footsteps of More Than This is a very hard thing to do. Having read The Rest of Us Just Live Here already, I say although it is a good book, it is not quite as good as the previous.

 

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